


staying put

by ottermo



Series: As Prompted [26]
Category: Humans (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post Series 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2019-01-06 05:21:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12204693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ottermo/pseuds/ottermo
Summary: After the Elsters leave, Toby notices a change in Sophie.





	staying put

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Week 1, Day 3 of the Humans 4-Week Challenge. The prompt was "In Between".

 

Sophie spends a lot of time at the window these days.

Behind her, the rooms get emptier and emptier, as everyone packs their lives into boxes, preparing for the move. Sophie has not yet packed her toys and books. Whenever she’s sent up to do so, she spends her time staring out at the back garden. Toby knows, because he’s seen her doing it. Perfectly still, like Mia used to stand, arms in straight lines down her side and feet neatly parallel.

It’s the Saturday before the moving vans are due, and Toby has been dispatched to help his little sister pack. “Do it for her, if she refuses,” said his mother, pressing a weary hand to her forehead. She’s been sorting through stuff from the loft since 6 this morning, throwing away as much as she can bear to. There’s a pile she’s set aside for Toby, and she presses it in his arms as he leaves to find Sophie. “See what you want out of that lot,” she tells him.

Toby goes up and dumps the pile on his bed, then heads for Sophie’s room, and sure enough she’s standing by the window when he gets there, watching the empty garden as though it’s the most interesting thing she’s ever seen. “Soph,” he says. “It’s time to pack your stuff. Mum’s getting fed up of waiting.”

She doesn’t flinch at the sound of his voice, doesn’t turn or speak to him. Toby comes further into the room. “Come on, titch. We can make it into a game,” he offers.

He pulls one of the toy boxes out from under her little desk. He’s expecting to see a jumble of mixed-up objects from different sets, but instead all the toys are neatly lined up. Dinosaurs with dinosaurs, farm animals in a row, dolls stacked along one side. “Oh,” says Toby, baffled. “You’ve already done this one. Nice. That makes it easier. Why didn’t you just tell Mum you’ve already packed?”

“I haven’t packed,” says Sophie, bluntly. “I just keep them tidy.”

This is news to Toby, who has spent the last seven years tripping over Sophie’s toys in the weirdest of places, but he lets it go. “Alright,” he says. “Are all the toy boxes like this?”

“Yes.”

“Cool. They can just go straight in like that, then. So we’ll just put the rest of the stuff in the cardboard ones.”

He turns to pull over the pile of packing boxes that have been sitting in the corner of her room for a week and a half, untouched. He sets one in front of Sophie’s bookshelf, and begins transferring her books. Even the shelf is much neater now. All the books with numbers on their spines are lined up in their sets, in the correct order. The ones without numbers seem to be in order of size, with the tallest on the left. At least she hasn’t ordered them by author surname, like at the library, Toby thinks. That would be weird.

But then, all of this is a bit weird.

“Are you sure you don’t want to help me?” he asks. “I might be doing it wrong. I might forget about something you need to take with you.”

She doesn’t answer. He finishes with the books, and adds some of the toys that are on her dresser, to fill up the extra space. Then he starts a new box. Sophie is immune to all the shuffling around. Toby gets the feeling she’s just waiting for him to leave, so she can put everything back the way it was.

He winds up her music box, just for something to fill the silence. It plays a twinkly little tune as he fills the next packing box, and he sings along with it, _‘How much is that Sophie in the window…’_

He can’t think of a line to go with that, so he just hums along with the rest.

He’s not sure what to do with the dolls’ house, which is sort of a box of its own, so he puts it with the filled boxes and starts another one. He finds a plastic box of toy cars that were his before Sophie was born, and remembers vividly the day he’d bestowed them upon her, feeling like the kindest and most noble big brother in the world. She hadn’t been very interested at first, but they’d built a little town together one rainy afternoon, with roads and crossings and railway tracks, and even though she was only two and a half, Sophie had been so careful with it, stepping over the lines, pausing traffic to allow her Sylvanian families to cross safely. They’d all had to look left and right, picked up one by one with chubby little hands and forced to check both directions. Sophie had always quite liked rules. But at least she’d still wanted to play.

Toby puts the cars in a packing box. She’ll play with them again, he tells himself. Once we’re all settled in the new house and things get back to normal, Sophie will too.

He works in silence for a little while longer. Then, suddenly, Sophie says, “We can’t move. They’ll won’t be able to find us if we move.”

Toby doesn’t have to ask who.

“They’ll find us if they need to,” he says. “They can look it up.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” he admits, “But they’re clever.”

“They might think we moved on purpose and we don’t want to be friends.”

“No, they won’t.”

He senses that she isn’t convinced. Toby tries a different tactic. “If we don’t move, Mattie will have to go on her own,” he says. “Do you want that to happen? She has to live near her university. Most people her age go and live with other students, not with their family. We’re moving so we can all stay together.”

This has been explained to Sophie already, of course, lots of times, but Toby wonders if she’s ever really listened.

“It’s not fair,” she says, and finally her voice has some kind of feeling in it. Even though he doesn’t like hearing his little sister upset, Toby’s kind of relieved that she’s reacting properly to something.

He picks up one of the toys that’s still on the dresser, and steps towards her. It’s her toy giraffe, soft and cuddly, and Toby holds it from behind, making its arm waggle up and down. He pokes Sophie with the giraffe’s hoof. “Hey. Mr Patches wants a hug, I think.”

Dutifully Sophie takes the toy and hugs it to her.

“The new house is really nice,” Toby says. “Mia and Niska will need you to show them around.”

His dad has already asked him not to talk that way around Sophie, as if the synths coming back is a certainty, or even something they’d want. But it seems to Toby that Sophie needs a bit of hope, or she’s just going to stand in front of that window, watching for Niska to come through the bushes again and in through the back door.

“And I’ll have to say, ‘Oh, sorry Mia, Sophie doesn’t live with us anymore. She wanted to stay at the old house in case you came back to there.’ And she’ll say, 'Oh, Toby, didn’t you tell her I would find your new address when I came to visit?’ And I’ll say, 'I did try to tell her that, Mia, but she thought you were too silly to do that.’ And she’ll say, 'Oh, Toby, how could—’”

He stops suddenly, caught off-guard by Sophie dropping her toy to the floor and slamming herself into him, hugging him around his waist. “Stop,” she says, muffled into his t-shirt. “I’ll come to the new house, then. I don’t think Mia’s silly.”

“I know you don’t,” Toby says, patting her hair a bit awkwardly. It’s a bit hard to hug someone back when they’re so much littler. He wonders if he did this to Mattie when he was small, if she had felt the same funny mixture of pleased and sad. No, not sad, exactly. Just a bit nostalgic, about the age of toy car traffic control, when Sophie was attached to him like a fifth limb, and always chattering on about what she was thinking about. Now it’s like she has this whole world of worries going on inside her head that he hardly knows anything about. She shouldn’t do, yet. She’s still so little.

“It’ll be okay once we get there,” he says, as much to himself as to Sophie. “Everything will go back to normal.”

He doesn’t add that they don’t have a 'normal’ any more - that knowing the Elsters precludes all of that.

He doesn’t add “I promise”, either.

 

 


End file.
